Dateline ACT

Angola: 07 / 02

Churches help make peace a reality in post-war Angola

Luanda, Angola, 26 July 2002
by Paul Jeffrey

Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of churches and church agencies responding to emergencies, is providing critical material aid to the victims of Angola’s conflict. At the same time, it is helping construct a new culture of reconciliation.

Working closely with the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Office in Angola (UNOA), ACT has made it possible for pastors and church leaders from several war-torn provinces to receive training as "human rights" or "peace and reconciliation" counselors. Working with local government officials and traditional village authorities, they are creating local and provincial human rights committees, reinventing ways to peacefully resolve conflicts within families, among neighbors, and between former enemies.

In many areas of the country, this peacemaking takes place in a vacuum. After the studied neglect of Portuguese colonial rule and 27 years of post-independence warfare, most provinces have no viable judicial or penal system. According to a U.N. survey in 2001, only 13 of 164 municipalities had functioning municipal courts. "They don’t take many prisoners in the provinces," said Patrick Hughes, deputy chief of UNOA’s Human Rights Division.

In order to construct a working legal system, Hughes’ office is training judges and prosecutors and providing computers to track cases, which are often simply lost in the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the existing court system. "A poor guy could steal a bag of cement and spend years in jail simply because they lost his case," says Hughes.

Training lawyers to do their job is another element of remaking the judicial system. "It's a massive task," comments Hughes. "Lawyers here have been trained to obey the police and judges. We’re teaching them how to be lawyers, that working for their client is their main job."

In a July 3 report, Human Rights Watch claimed that the Angolan legal system - or lack thereof - is particularly harsh on the four million Angolans who have been displaced by the war.

"Many of the displaced lack identity documentation" it states, "facilitating harassment by the authorities, especially the national police. Arbitrary beatings and arrests occur when the displaced are unable to present personal identification documents to the police and are unable to bribe their way out."

The report goes on to observe that women and girls are particularly vulnerable to assaults, including sexual violence, by policemen and soldiers located in road control posts when on their way to and from isolated agricultural areas or when collecting water. Additionally, without documentation, the displaced, and especially children, are unable to access social services. The sobas (traditional authorities) routinely demand bribes to include people on lists to receive assistance. Local landowners regularly exploit the internally displaced as a source of cheap labor for cultivation; those that manage to find work as agricultural laborers are regularly subject to extortion at military and police checkpoints when they return from the fields. Soldiers that guard access to the camps also ‘tax’ the residents and steal food and non- food relief items.

Such massive human rights violations could not be redressed quickly enough by changing only the formal structures. What was needed was change from below, the cultivation of a culture of complaint among affected populations. Aid workers, having witnessed two periods of quasi-peace during the 1990s inevitably dissolve into bloodshed, believed that empowering civilian leaders could help break the cycle. "It’s much easier to distribute food and blankets, but this work of building peace and reconciliation is extremely important. One of the reasons that past cease-fires didn’t succeed was that no one was speaking up about human rights violations," said Carl von Seth, the Angola representative for the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), a member of ACT.

During much of the nineties, the U.N. mission in Angola was sharply criticized by rights activists for its failure to include human rights education in its work. This time around, people like Hughes are determined to do things differently.

In cooperation with UNOA, ACT/LWF began workshops last year in the war-torn eastern province of Moxico. The Angolan constitution and several international legal documents, like the U.N.’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child, served as texts. According to Moises Gourgel, the ACT/LWF director in the provincial capital of Luena, the workshops focused on "encouraging people, especially the displaced, to know their rights and obligations, and then speak up. If people don’t demand their rights, it makes it easier for the government not to assume its responsibility."

At the same time that church leaders are being trained as human rights activists, the U.N. is conducting seminars on conflict resolution for the sobas, the traditional village leaders.

According to Emilio Cesar, the Moxico coordinator for the ACT/LWF program on rights, reconciliation and peace, the work of the church-based counselors became even more urgent with the April cease-fire that followed the death of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. "With these people emerging from the bush, there cannot be room for revenge or rancor," Cesar argues. "And the church is in a unique position to help create this culture of peace. The church is a bridge. It is present in every village, and it’s willing to get involved without fear."

The workshops, and a variety of related skits broadcast in six languages on provincial radio stations, often focus more on peacefully resolving conflicts within the family than on larger political tensions but they are nonetheless effective. "You don’t have to talk specifically about conflicts with UNITA to get your point across," said von Seth. "Angolans need to learn new ways to resolve conflicts at every level, and it may be easier to start at the family level."

But the lingering political gaps aren’t ignored. ACT/LWF helped organize a June 29 ecumenical worship service in the UNITA demobilization camp at Chicala. Gourgel says it was an important moment for local leaders of churches and other civil society groups to dialogue face to face with the former UNITA combatants. "There is so much to do, we have no time for further divisions" he observes. "It’s time for all of us Angolans to stand united so we can reconstruct our country. It’s time for children to study, for the old to be cared for, and for new opportunities of employment to be created."

In the northern province of Uige, another ACT member, the Evangelical Reformed Church of Angola (ACT/IERA), co-sponsored a May workshop where 59 peace counselors were trained.

One of those trained was Armando Mabaia, a Reformed Church pastor in the provincial capital. He says police abuse of civilians was one of the main topics addressed in the workshop. "These things happen because the police don’t know the laws, and the people don’t know their rights and how to defend themselves against the police," says Mabaia.

To educate both civilians and government officials, the provincial human rights committee, with funding from UNHCR, broadcasts a live 45-minute program every Saturday on the local government radio station. Committee members discuss a different theme on each program. Over recent weeks, they’ve discussed domestic violence, women’s rights, how the courts work, and the rights of the displaced. Although access to phones in the province is minimal, citizens are invited to call in with their complaints.

One early test of the radio program’s effectiveness came when someone called to denounce the case of two police officers who had raped a woman and not yet been punished. Appeals to the officers’ superiors were going nowhere, but the phone call to the radio program led to the eventual prosecution and jailing of the two officers.

"People have a right to know that they can expect certain things of the government, but it’s clear we have to struggle for those things. If we wait on the government to make change we’ll be waiting a long time," said Kula Romanos Jose, a Baptist who serves as secretary of the provincial committee.

"Our next task is to expand our work into the quartering areas where the former UNITA soldiers are living. We need to attack the distrust that remains. Although the military leaders agreed to a cease-fire, it’s up to us to work out a spiritual cease-fire," says Jose. "Many of the UNITA troops are afraid. They think they face intimidation or death from others. The role of civil society right now is not to leave peace to the politicians, but to assume it as our own task, inviting into the process those who have been left outside."